


Some Like It Hot

by 26stars



Series: Fall Prompts 2020 [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Birthday Dinner, Casually peppering in Chinese, F/F, First time...trying hotpot, Hotpot, Trying new foods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26659531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Melinda has invited the other women to try something new for her birthday.A new dish, I mean.For the fall prompt 'MayBobbi+spice' and also my Femslash Bingo 'dinner party' square
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Melinda May/Bobbi Morse
Series: Fall Prompts 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931209
Comments: 16
Kudos: 20
Collections: Femslash Bingo, Women of the MCU





	Some Like It Hot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agentmmayy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmmayy/gifts).



> Ness, I know you're the dumpling queen but if we ever meet we're having hotpot. Thanks for this prompt!

Bobbi had always considered herself an adventurous eater, so she was never intimidated by her boyfriends or girlfriends introducing her new dishes or foods. She liked to think she’d been good to try the local specialty whenever she traveled to a new place undercover with SHIELD, and on longer missions, she’d made an effort to learn how new dishes were cooked, or at least what made them unique.

So Melinda May taking her, Daisy, and Jemma to a restaurant she called “the best outside of Sichuan” did not intimidate her in the least.

The table setup, however, did confuse her.

Their four-sided table had a large space cut out in the middle where a gas burner was installed, and there was barely enough table room around it for a bowl of rice to sit in front of each of them. To order, Melinda was handed the menu, which was just a large sheet of paper with foods broken down by category, and a pencil.

“Is anyone allergic to seafood?” she asked, glancing around at all of them as she hovered the pencil over the menu. “I feel like I should know that by now…”

“Nope, not allergic to any foods that I know of,” Bobbi said, doing her best to read the small print across the table. It was all characters, which had never been her strong suit.

“Same,” Daisy and Jemma both added, also seeming perplexed by the setup. 

“Great,” Melinda said, bowing over the table and beginning to write on the paper. “What vegetables do you all like best?”

“Broccoli, green beans, fresh spinach, salad…” Bobbi said, not sure what they could possibly be ordering that would call for a burner (She’d never been given too many assignments in China, seeing as her tall blonde self stuck out like a sore thumb, Chinese speaker or not…).

“Cabbage?” Jemma offered. “Carrots?”

Daisy looked a little embarrassed. “I’m the kid who grew up thinking potatoes were a vegetable—still learning to eat my greens,” she admitted. “I’ll try whatever you order, though.”

“How does everyone feel about tofu?” Melinda asked without looking up, her pencil ticking boxes down a list of vegetables (at least Bobbi could read the header…).

“Sure, unless it has that kind of _old_ aftertaste…” Bobbi said gamely.

“Um, I can’t say I’ve ever tried it,” Jemma said, sounding a little nervous. “But I’ve always been intrigued by plant-based proteins.”

“I haven’t tried it because I’m a coward,” Daisy said more readily. “Do your worst, May.”

“I didn’t invite you all to my birthday dinner to torment you,” Melinda said, shaking her head. “Okay, would you all prefer beef or lamb for the meat?”

“Uh, beef?” Daisy said cautiously, and Melinda nodded, scanning her selections.

“Cool. Okay, now the big question,” she finally looked up. “How spicy do you want the soup to be? On a scale of one to five?”

Bobbi started to feel nervous. She loved intense flavors on her tongue, but her stomach didn’t always love spice once it got to the end of the road.

Still, she would have hated to miss out on any part of the experience because she was nervous.

“What level do you like, May?” she deflected. “You know we’re all noobs, but I think we can trust your judgment.”

Melinda smirked.

“Okay, we’ll give a four a try then. But I’ll get a non-spicy soup too in the middle just in case it’s too much for you.”

“No! Go big or go home!” Daisy insisted. “ If you’re getting a mild soup too, get us a five on the spicy!”

“Daisy, just because you’ve got half Chinese genes doesn’t mean you’ll like it.” Melinda cautioned, writing something on the menu and handing the paper and pen to the waiter. “You can always add extra spice in your dipping sauce if you think I shortchanged you.”

“How can you put one soup in the middle of another?” Bobbi asked skeptically as Melinda faced them again.

“You’ll see,” she said, standing up as the waiter left. “Now, everyone follow me and I’ll show you what to do for your dipping sauce.”

A buffet-style sideboard near the middle of the restaurant was stacked with small porcelain bowls at one end and crowded with larger bowls of sauces and other toppings in the rest of the space. Everything was labelled in Chinese and English, and Melinda pointed out which sauces were less spicy for Jemma.

“You can add as much or as little of anything as you want,” Melinda said as she poured black vinegar over everything she already had in her bowl, “but I’d advise you to take it easy on the soy sauce. You can’t un-salt your sauce if you go overboard.”

Not long after the four of them sat down again, a waiter came to set each place with a saucer, a small empty bowl, and a pair of chopsticks. They were poured small cups of hot water, and Bobbi heard Melinda order an extra drink from the waiter before he left.

“Plum juice?” she said, smiling at her. “Is that in honor of you?”

Jemma looked confused, but Daisy grinned.

“Aw, is that the character for your last name?” she said, her eyes bright. “ _Méi_?”

Melinda nodded with a tilt of her chin. “It is, but I’m ordering it for you three who probably aren’t used to both eating _and_ drinking something hot.”

The drink arrived in a tall pitcher along with four extra cups, and Melinda poured three for them.

“To Melinda May,” Bobbi said, raising her cup for an understated toast. “Happy birthday!”

The next thing to land on their table was a wide, flat pot that filled most of the space in the cutout in the table. There were indeed two kinds of soup, since the pot had a donut-like partition that held a smaller quantity of a cloudy white soup, while the outer ring was filled with something that was almost pure red. Once the pot was situated, the waiter crouched beneath the table to turn on the gas flame, then stepped away while the soup warmed.

“I’m guessing the red’s the ‘four’?” Jemma said nervously.

Melinda hummed. “Good guess.”

She put her chopsticks into the red soup and drew out a small, twig-like thing that was covered with what looked like green peppercorns.

“This is _huājiāo_. It’s one of the most important ingredients in hotpot, but don’t eat it.”

“Doesn’t that stuff make your mouth tingle?” Bobbi asked, and Melinda gave her a knowing smirk.

“Can’t wait to see what you think of that.” She dropped the twig back in, fished around again, then showed them a few different kinds of peppers.

“These are all technically edible, but they don’t really digest well, and your stomach won’t like it. Just drop them back in if you get them on your chopsticks. Same if you get a ginger piece. Don’t confuse it with potato. You’ll know once you try to take a bite.”

“What about that?” Daisy asked, pointing to the round red things floating in the white soup.

“Those are dried jujubes. They’re actually a little sweet, but they’re also just there for flavor.”

The three nodded seriously, and then their waiter approached again.

“I ordered a few things you’d know and some things that might be new,” Melinda said as a small cart was wheeled up to their table. It had three shelves full of plates of sliced raw food, everything from meat to vegetables to noodles to…a couple of things Bobbi wasn’t sure about.

“What is that, seaweed?” Daisy asked, pointing to a platter of dark green strips.

“It is,” Melinda answered, and Daisy looked perplexed.

“And what’s that?” Bobbi asked, pointing to a plate of slices of something that looked like a potato that had had a hole-punch taken to it.

“Lotus root. It doesn’t really have much flavor of its own. Kind of a crunchier starch than a potato.”

“What about those?” Daisy was pointing to something that looked rather unfortunately like long band-aids.

“Those are noodles made out of a really thin tofu. They won’t mess up the soup if we boil them now.”

“And this?” Jemma was pointing at some slices of something white that didn’t look like a vegetable or a noodle.

“ _Niángāo_ ,” Melinda said, shrugging at the lack of translation. “It’s basically just a plain starch made of rice flour.”

When the soup started boiling a few minutes later, Melinda started taking plates from the cart one by one and adding their contents to the two soups, stopping once the soup level got close to the brim.

“The potato will take the longest to cook, so just grab around them for now,” Melinda said, stirring the soups with the strainer-ladle from the cart. “But once the beef is cooked, everything else is good to go.”

She demonstrated how to fish out a piece of something, dip it in her sauce, and then bring it to her mouth.

“You can let stuff cool on your plate if you need to,” she said, gesturing to their place settings. “Otherwise, _chī ba!”_

Bobbi picked up her chopsticks and dove in, and Daisy and Jemma cautiously followed suit. They all were able to manage with just fine chopsticks, but Melinda also used the ladle to pull out things and add them to their plates like a queue. Bobbi was surprised to find that she really liked the winter melon—it just tasted like the soup it had been cooked in—but the lotus root was a little too crunchy when she tried it.

“Maybe let that one cook a little longer too,” Melinda said, adding some tofu noodles to the soups once there was space. “And no one eat too fast—that’s the only way to do hotpot wrong.”

Between the spice, the heat, and the drawn-out process, Bobbi wondered how anyone could manage to eat a meal like this quickly. She was still impressed though how they all made progress through the cart of food, one dish at a time. By the time the plates were all empty (and Melinda had finally added the noodles), Bobbi’s stomach was plenty full, and it didn’t even seem too upset by all the spice (though Bobbi had been careful to alternate between the hot and mild soups).

“There’s still one more thing coming, but it’s a desert,” Melinda said as she turned off the burner while the three of them leaned back in their chairs, already plenty full.

“Ice cream?” Daisy said hopefully. “That seems like the perfect thing to have after a dinner like this.”

“This isn’t one of _those_ Chinese restaurants, sorry,” Melinda said with a wink. “But I think you’ll like this dessert anyway.”

The dish landed on their table, and Melinda used a fresh pair of chopsticks to put a pair of flat, golden round things on each of their plates.

“What’s inside?” Bobbi asked, picking hers up.

“Try it and guess,” Melinda challenged her.

The breaded treat was still warm and was filled with a soft, slightly-gooey orange filling inside.

“Is it…pumpkin?” Jemma finally guessed, and Melinda flashed her a thumbs up.

“Yes! Now you know what pumpkin tastes like without all those other fall spices.”

“It doesn’t really taste like anything…” Daisy said slowly, still chewing.

Melinda smiled, biting into another.

“Exactly.”

**Author's Note:**

> ok but if you haven't seen [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWWwmZ9RxxQ) just know it plays in my head every time 'pumpkin spice season' rolls around.


End file.
